Pruitthealth - Augusta Hills

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our inspection ratings are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home's next most favorable area turned out to be its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of C. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. Nursing ratings are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

Moving on to our last area, this nursing home was given a C in long-term care, which is generally an acceptable grade. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's personal care rather than the highly skilled therapy or healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to only 73.8806 percent of its residents. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.